North Richmond’s moribund housing projects

When he was hired on to work as a gardener for the “Lots of Crops” urban agriculture program in December 2010, Ervin Coley III was living with his mom and baby brother.

They stayed in a public housing unit on the first floor of the Las Deltas Housing Projects, a cluster of 224-public housing units notorious for crime and saddled with chronically insufficient funding, scant security and a months-long backlog on maintenance.